I am yet to find any official statement from Oculus on this. Am I missing something?
They have a support article and fix at https://support.oculus.com/217157135500529/
All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate
281–290 of 390 posts
Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a medical device, I would expect that this possibility would have been caught very early on in one of any number of Failure Analysis meetings and mitigated by the time the device made it to the (FDA) certification process.
I’m going to assume you haven’t used many bits of medical equipment, because doing it for a job leads me to conclude that the software is more flakey than standard commercial software used day to day. Low sales volumes do not make for budgets high enough to support good debugging and development I guess.
I haven't worked in a medical lab (where our instruments were generally used). But I was a software developer for various medical devices for over 15 years and my conclusion was exactly the opposite: the software was far, far more robust than most commercial software.
Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate
#283Why does a device you own have to have an expiring certificate?
Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Give the engineer the day off, that's classic side think :)
Well every comment thread on the Internet related to the Rift issue mentioned this as a solution so it probably wasn't his idea.
Anyone who had an interest in computers in the mid 90-s to early 2000-s will remember trial software that was good for 30 days but which, if you set the clock back would give you the corresponding amount of extra time.
I even seem to recall one that when I set the clock back much more than 30 days gave me as many more days beyond the 30 as as much as I had set it back.
Then there were a couple pieces of software that would detect such trickery and which would punish you by taking away the time you had left also if you set back the date before the 30 days were up.
Anyway, with this in mind, the first thing I thought when I read the headlines was, “I wonder if one can get around this by setting the clock back”, and I doubt I was alone in that, so to say that it “probably wasn’t his idea”... I dunno man.
Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate
#285Our VR surgical training startup has been working for the last few months towards a big medical conference this week where we're showing multiple training procedures for multiple customers on Oculus Rift, as well as having our own booth. The headsets all stopped working the morning of the conference. Fortunately one of our engineers figured out we could get our demo rigs working by setting the clock back a few days.…
This does not bode well for real VR surgery. Imagine if this were surgery day for someone, and because of an expiring certificate the rift shuts down ...
You'd pay lots of money to get immediate high-level support ... investors will love it!
Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not like a cert is necessary for it to function. A VR headset is basically a monitor you wear on your face. This is their own poor design choice that just ensures they're going to lose business of anyone who needs reliability in their headset.
The "monitor you wear on your face" trope is simply inaccurate, and essentially a misunderstanding of the state of VR today. I say this not to either criticize you or excuse the mistake by Oculus (they really needed to countersign their cert with a timestamp server), but to educate. These are non-obvious issues to people that don't follow the VR sector. Monitors work without low-level drivers because their maturity (…
Yeah but, certs are not necessary for the oculus rift to function.
Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate
#287Shameless plug: To avoid such embarrassing situations in future, I've made https://monitorcertificates.com/ . It's free to use right now, and sends your reminders on Slack and Email.
Your service does not actually seem to be able to monitor this kind of certificate, IMHO moving this from "shameless" to "spam".
Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Give the engineer the day off, that's classic side think :)
A day off? That's all? Give that man a raise! Something to look back upon each month. He might have saved the company and even if not, probably a lot of money anyway... it's only fair to give something back.
A day off is nice, but doesn't mean that much in the scheme of things.
I would like to see more companies write a Thank You letter from the CEO, signed by his managers. Something that he could use during his performance evaluations at the company, or attach to his resume for any other jobs.
It's hard to get concrete evidence like that, which shows your value to the company. It would great to have documentation that could never be forgotten.
Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not like a cert is necessary for it to function. A VR headset is basically a monitor you wear on your face. This is their own poor design choice that just ensures they're going to lose business of anyone who needs reliability in their headset.
The "monitor you wear on your face" trope is simply inaccurate, and essentially a misunderstanding of the state of VR today. I say this not to either criticize you or excuse the mistake by Oculus (they really needed to countersign their cert with a timestamp server), but to educate. These are non-obvious issues to people that don't follow the VR sector. Monitors work without low-level drivers because their maturity (…
You said a cert is required, but the footnote quote says drivers must be signed. Being signed doesn't expire. Could you rectify the discrepancy and explain why an expiring cert is a requirement for VR, your analysis (though clearly highly informed) seems spurious to me.
Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, you’re talking about the proliferation of declarative APIs over explicit, imperative ones. My pet theory is that because we typically understand our needs before we understand the code paths required to fulfill them, our V1 APIs are usually a declarative “this is what should be” interface. Then we spend days or months making it happen and by the time we understand the required code paths, we’ve totally baked our…
I think your theory and seeming aversion to declarative interfaces is a bit too general. Many declarative interfaces are the culmination of decades of work on re-inventing the wheel at the imperative level. The relational model and SQL databases are a great example of this - “we’ve solved these problems below this line mostly, please move on and focus up the stack closer to the customer/user”. It became a multi billi…
No, I agree with you. There are some great declarative interfaces and there are many problems best solved by one.
SQL is a great example. But it’s also an example of how difficult it is to make a great declarative API. Look how much effort went into designing and then refining and then adapting SQL to changing needs. It’s been an enormous effort across a huge community.
Same with CSS. Those aren’t things some developer just wrote and they got refined in an application over time. There are entire conferences about the regular redefinition of those interfaces.
My point is that concept doesn’t scale to some large number of abstractions. SQL and CSS are big manifolds that operate on the boundary of your application, and often separate you from an entire other group of developers working to maintain the other side of that contract.
If you try to apply that same setup to every problem, with thousands of declarative manifolds all intersecting within your application, you get chaos. Which is what many modern frameworks try to do. Declarative APIs only work when they are rare and standard and everyone knows them.